Facing the Camera

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The Victoria Miro Gallery in London, which is currently showing the installation "Playtime."CreditCourtesy of Isaac Julien and Victoria Miro

By Farah Nayeri

Feb. 17, 2014

LONDON — One amusing scene in the British artist Isaac Julien’s new film installation “Playtime” shows the actor James Franco impersonating a smarmy art dealer. Sporting three-day stubble and an obsequious smile, he faces the camera and says, “For today’s wealthy investor, the acquiring and holding of collectibles is akin to building a store of treasure.”

“Playtime,” a seven-screen installation at the Victoria Miro Gallery here through March 1, was inspired by the global financial crisis, and it represents a daring step for the pioneering film artist. Instead of focusing on gay subculture or migration, subjects he has tackled in previous installations, Mr. Julien takes on his own artistic circle to show how financial speculation has turned art into a commodity.

“We need to reflect on what it is that we’re participating in,” Mr. Julien said in a recent interview. “We need to look in a mirror and question what it is that we do.”

He described the 70-minute “Playtime” as “both a critical and a comedic, satirical look at capital,” and added, “There shouldn’t be no-go areas in art. Art has to be a broad church, and to cover as many different angles on things as it can.”

The sweet-natured 53-year-old works in a sleek new canal-side studio in Shoreditch, East London, a previously rough area near where he went to school. The space has light-oak shelving, stylish furniture and a curtained screening area.

“How everything looks is very important,” Mr. Julien said at his studio, where he appeared in designer sneakers and a sharp navy suit. “Sometimes people critique that in my work — that things look too beautiful. But I think it’s something that’s really in me.”

Most of the film’s five segments are derived from real-life episodes. The Icelandic man who loses his dream house in the crash represents one of the artist’s friends. The Filipina maid who longs for release from her rich Dubai employers is based on the story of Mr. Julien’s housekeeper, who fled a similar situation for London. And the black hedge-fund manager preparing to move his staff into a London skyscraper is loosely inspired by Kweku Adoboli — the former UBS trader serving a seven-year prison sentence in connection with a $2.3 billion trading loss.

As for the art dealer played by Mr. Franco, he’s a composite of gallerists met along the way. In the scene, Mr. Franco, who has produced video art of his own, appears during an actual painting exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery that he co-curated in real life, and shouts: “Which one of these artworks will rocket up in value first?”

In another tongue-in-cheek segment, the auctioneer Simon de Pury tells an interviewer that he collects superstitions — picking up new ones as he goes along — and, for good luck, eats an apple one hour before each auction. He’s then shown in a vacant glass room, gesturing wildly and slamming his hammer for effect.

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A self-portrait that Isaac Julien took last year during the production of "Playtime."CreditIsaac Julien

Mr. Julien’s London dealer seems unfazed that the parody was partly shot in her gallery. “It’s the artist’s role to be critical and to be reflective of their own milieu,” Victoria Miro said. “The art world is an important context to look at, especially at this time.”

Mr. Julien grew up in an East London housing project. His parents were migrants from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, and his father worked as a welder at a Ford car plant. As a teenager, he was routinely harassed by peers who realized he was gay before he did. Art school offered a welcome escape, as did clubbing and fashion.

He said he realized early on that art was his calling. “If you’re an artist, you basically have to express yourself,” Mr. Julien said. “It’s a terrible thing to have, because it’s embarrassing: it’s, to a certain extent, calling attention to oneself.”

His films, he said, have always focused on “ordinary subjects that I feel moved by.” In 1989, he released what he considers his pivotal piece: “Looking for Langston,” a depiction of gay black desire inspired by the life of the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. In 1991, his first feature “Young Soul Rebels” — set in East London — won the Semaine de la Critique prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

At around that time, he briefly taught an art student named Steve McQueen, who wanted a black tutor, and whose “12 Years a Slave” is now up for nine Oscars. “I think it’s a masterpiece, and I want him to win every single award going,” said Mr. Julien.

In 2007, Mr. Julien released “Western Union: Small Boats,” on the plight of African migrants risking their lives to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa. Three years later came “Ten Thousand Waves,” a poetic meditation on the more than 20 Chinese cockle pickers who drowned on a British sandbank in 2004, which uses fantasy and historical flashbacks to evoke the life-threatening conditions that migrants endure to reach a more financially secure life. The installation ended its three-month run in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York on Monday. Coinciding with the MoMA display, all through December in Times Square, “Playtime” excerpts replaced ads in the three minutes before midnight.

“The work’s deft imbrication of styles and settings is not only a technical achievement — it’s an argument for a more engaged understanding of history,” The New Yorker wrote of “Ten Thousand Waves” in December.

His influence is felt at home, too — he was just named to the global arts chair at the University of the Arts London, and he’s already thinking about his next project about the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, who died in 1992.

“Playtime” — which is scheduled to travel to Mr. Julien’s galleries in Sydney, Madrid and Amsterdam later this year — has been well received so far. “It’s probably on its way to being considered one of Isaac’s strongest works,” said Stuart Comer, MoMA’s chief curator of media and performance art, who until recently was at Tate Modern in London. “A lot of the issues it addresses are being debated actively in the media at the moment, and I think for someone within the art world to take on these issues is a very interesting gesture.”

Given Mr. Julien’s reputation, it seems odd that he has never had a big London show. “He falls between the cracks,” Mr. Comer said.

“I think people are still trying to place him,” he added. “He will get his due, eventually.”